Daughters of Babylon (39 page)

The cross between a giant upright earwig and segmented humanoid didn’t bother to impersonate Dr. Shirazi anymore. It bobbed and clicked along the furrows of its primordial kingdom carefree, relaxed, boasting of the millions upon millions over millennia who’d sought the powers of abundant Creation, summoned a djinn, and messed up. They always messed up, and for the same tired reasons—greed, fear, shame, and self-doubt.

“Shame is the worst.”
Click, click
. “Shame, blame, guilt, fear…shameblameguiltfear. That’s what brought the Temple down. Not arrogance, not thumbing their noses at God, but shame, feeling bad for feeling good, afraid of the heights of limitless abundance, screwing up their minds and thinking that joy is a silent thief that takes from others, leaving them with less.”
Click, click, click.
“It’s how they lost the boy, those women and their friends. The Daughters of Babylon, they’d been doing so well. Not since the Courts of Love at the time of the Good Queen had
Reine du Ciel
so thrived. We allies were flocking to the boundaries like bees to pollen. “Let us help, let us help!” We reached across, joined with their success, and grew it; we brought them secrets direct from Ceres and Bab-El, the Gate of God, through poetry, through balance and wisdom of soil, fruit, and nutmeats.

“Young Thomas was the brightest, always curious, always happy, everything about Queen of Heaven, he appreciated. The village was coming to life again, the vineyards were more prosperous than ever—and then one day, someone said, wouldn’t it be nice if people saw us as something more than hippies, and we could persuade governments, historians, and scientists that we’re on to something. And Tariq started harvesting the opium poppy...”

Silvina tuned him out. The ability to turn her senses off or on was all she had since she’d made the error of attempting to prevent a historical event—and not even quite historic, the walling of Catarina. No one remembered her name. How long ago Silvie’s faux pas occurred, she didn’t know, but ever since, she’d been holding in her mind the full spectrum of Enjoyment, Humour Personal, Humour Universal, Inclusiveness, Audacity, Curiosity, Appreciation, and its mirror image—holding, holding—letting the djinn talk, for he loved to talk, and whatever one loves is the place to begin. The more she focused on the spectrum of abundance, the further along the light prism they traveled. The corridor that had begun as infra-red and dungeon-like had passed through orange, yellow, green, and when the vibrations reached the All in All Inclusiveness of Green, Silvina began to feel physicality return, her self cohering with the cellular recomposition of blood and bone and pulse and flow. The creature kept on talking, and she followed. Thinking bold and funny thoughts, appreciating, brought them to deep violet and deeper still, till suddenly—

The djinn stopped. “What’s this?”

“The end.”

He turned and saw Silvina fully formed. He shrieked and leaped on hairy, insectoid feet as if the ground had turned to fire, but ultra-violet is cool. And so were her thoughts. Silvie had walked away all fear; the cause that brought the Tower down, she had no more.

“Vivian walked this far with you too, didn’t she?” Silvina said. “All those years alone in that house, researching, trying to retrace their steps, reclaim what they’d lost—and for awhile, you were helpful.”

“That’s not always how we are seen.”

“We humans don’t see each other that way either, but it’s true. Djinns, allies, inorganic beings, all of us have an equal right to be.”

While they stood regarding one another, the djinn had begun to reassemble the appearance of Dr. Shirazi, possibly because the look had pleased Vivian who’d genuinely loved the archeologist. And possibly because he knew that earwigs were not considered dapper by humanity. So his smile was pleasant, his expression convincingly sincere.

“You are correct, Miss Silvina.” It was the first time in these realms that he’d used her name. “The great actress, Miss Lansdowne and I also reached the end. I told you it was coming, didn’t I? A djinn can do many things, but unlike you, we cannot lie.”

Silvie peered over his shoulder. “Behind you are the steps carved into the mountain that lead from
Reine du Ciel
to St. Jacques. They’re the steps where Viv fell and broke her neck.”

“I pushed her.”

“I know. And you did so as a favour. She knew she’d reached the end but thought she had achieved nothing. It’s like you said. Shame crept in, convincing her that she and the other Daughters had done wrong, fallen short, then
blameguiltfear
pushed up from behind, and you’re an ally, obliged to help. You can only reinforce a pre-existing thought flow.”

“She’d have been stuck here forever,” he said, “like the boy, but worse. She begged me to push her. I told her it would be dangerous. She said it didn’t matter. She’d made arrangements with a poet from South America and a businesswoman from Canada who’d once been a teenaged runaway. I agreed to stand in as her old boyfriend, whom she kept alive in her heart, I’ll have you know, until her dying breath.”

“So was it fear that caused her to lose her footing?”

“Yes. There was a chance until the final moment in her leap from No Time to Time that she could have recollected herself. Even during the tumble, hundreds of feet down, she could have…” The djinn gave a crickety sort of shrug.

“She could have appreciated and enjoyed.” Silvina smiled. “I think I’d have had trouble with that contrast too.”

“Nonetheless, it was possible.”

“Thank you. You’ve been very helpful. And now it’s my turn.”

“Do you know what to do?”

“I believe I can do whatever I like, so if you wouldn’t mind stepping aside…”

The djinn did as he was asked, and the shimmering violet haze, roughly circular but moving like an oil stain on water, became fully visible.

“My grandmother used to call me Pikku Silli, Little Herring. It’s one of the first things Viv and I talked about when she took a chance on me, twenty-two years ago.”

“Are you well-versed in the behaviour of little herrings?”

“Oh, yes.”

He gave her a gracious Dr. Shirazi smile. “Then you’ll be fine.”

Silvina had decided during her sojourns through Humour that a crazy running leap would work best. And so she backed up about a dozen steps and started to sprint, picked up speed, and by the time she reached the boundary of No Time, hair rippling, lungs strong and clear, she ran with full oscillation and the joyful cry of Little Herring, “Sliiiitheeeerrrrr!” resounded across the peaks of Queen of Heaven, and she landed, not at the base of 800-year-old steps but somewhere green, peaceful, and quite horizontal. As she lay face down, exhilarated, breathing in the fresh, dewy scent of grass and purple clover, something cold and wet with long corkscrew curls nuzzled her cheek and said, “Ba-a-a-a-h.”

The Land Rover with Silvina and three Basque shepherds pulled into the driveway behind her yellow Lexus on a Wednesday, four days after she’d vanished from the hallway into No Time. All the Navarrosa vehicles were long gone, although there was a dark blue Clio parked beside Gavriel’s motorbike.

“You’re sure Monsieur Navarro will not mind signing all these?” said Eneko, who sat in the back with a pile of books between him and his cousin Dunixi. He’d brought not only his own copies of Gav’s poetry books but his Mom’s, aunts’, and sisters’.

“I can’t imagine why he’d mind,” Silvina said, while Josepe turned off the engine, looking as though he intended to stay in the vehicle. “Please, all of you come inside, meet the other essential party of the rescue team.” On a phone conversation, Gavriel had read her the rubielo he wrote of finding a woman scattered into jewel-like colours across a river bed. “That’s it,” he said, after she’d described her experience. “My revised edition of
The Light Stalker’s Handbook
is going to be all rubielos, once I’ve figured out what they are.”

Silvina led Dunixi, Eneko, and Josepe into the
foganha
and found Gavriel sitting at the island with his laptop, a garage door sized hole in the wall behind him where the pots used to hang. He’d forewarned her—“there’s been some renovation”—but it was still a shock to see the physical facsimile of something that occurred far beyond the physical. In her sojourn with the djinn, she’d forgotten to worry whether Gav heard or understood to look behind the big dipper, lower case, not the Big Dipper in the sky.

“Silvina!” Gav’s face lit up, and he came around the counter.

“Ah, the tunnels!” exclaimed Dunixi. “I used to lose my dogs in there all the time. Once, we lost fifteen head of sheep, never saw them again.” His cousin poked him in the ribs and said something in Basque, probably, “Shut up!”

The hug between Silvina and Gavriel went on and on, plunging roots and sending out great branches; they both cried a little and leaves unfolded, buds swelled and burst to flower.

“How could I have forgotten?” Gavriel said, holding her face, taking in every detail, as if they hadn’t laid eyes on one other in centuries.

“You never forgot. Have you read your own poetry?” And flowers turned to fruit, green and tart but certain, as all things do, to ripen. They finally let go of each other, and Silvina wiped her eyes. “Phew! I should disappear more often.”

“Please don’t,” said Gav, laughing.

She introduced him to Dunixi, Eneko, and Josepe. “These guys are your biggest fans. I think they were more excited at the prospect of meeting you than finding a teleported woman in the middle of their Basco-Béarnaises.” That was the name of their breed of long-horned, curly-haired sheep, whom she intended to visit with treats as often as possible.

“Teleporting is not that unusual in these mountains,” said Josepe. “It happened to my uncle, though no one believed him when he landed in the bed of his best friend’s wife.”

The men groaned and laughed and punched one another, and Dunixi told Gavriel how his poetry had brought him, a shy shepherd, a beautiful wife. And Eneko insisted that the fertility issues he’d been having with his spouse Anika were cured by reading
The Wind and the Sea
aloud to one another.

“Our twins are now three-and-one-half. Would you like to see pictures?” He whipped out his cell phone.

“Sure!” said Gavriel. “I’d love to.”

Silvina, who’d seen the photos and heard stories from the shepherds that were centuries old and seldom shared for fear of being thought strange, including tales of djinns and a temple far to the south that fell, wandered into the parlour. A woman in a red silk skirt was sitting in the high-back wing chair, facing the fireplace. She had a laptop open with a full screen video playing.

“When did we get Internet connection in this house?” she said to no one in particular.

“Sometimes it’s best not to look into things too deeply.” The woman peeked her head around the chair. “Hello, Silvina.”

The room spun a little. “Blythe!”

The president/founder of Tri-Partite Academy set the computer aside and rose. Tall, elegant, silver hair pulled back in an S-shaped swirl, Blythe Pendaris walked toward her, arms outstretched. “You scared the bloody, freaking crap out of all of us.”

“I know.”

They hugged and cried, and the tree that Silvina and Gavriel grew in their moment of reconciliation and remembering dropped its fruit and orchards spread in pure, unrestricted abundance.
I could get used to this
, she thought, and sank into the other wing chair.